Yeah, I think the Manifest entry is the problem. I looked at the earlier zip posted in this thread, in the Manifest of ejb jar, there is no Class-Path entry which refers to the ejb client jar. So when it's processing the annotation, it could not load the ejb interface class therefore failed the annotation processing (which resulted the ejb component annotation not processed, and no EJB found).
I am not familiar with Eclipse, so I am not sure about the setting. I don't think it necessarily needs to package the app into an ear, but the Manifest entry in ejb jar does need to have the Class-Path entry.
[Message sent by forum member 'hzhang_jn' (hong.zhang_at_sun.com)]
http://forums.java.net/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=369952